"OXT" 2003 Obituary

OXTOBY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-03-07 published
OXTOBY,
WillardGurdon
Professor Emeritus of Comparative Religion at Trinity College,
the University of Toronto. Widely respected for his contribution
to the understanding of other faiths, Will contributed to and
edited the widely read book World Religions. Born in 1933 in
Marin County, California, Will graduated Phi Beta Kappa from
Stanford University and earned his Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies
at Princeton, with post-doctoral studies at Harvard Divinity
School. After working for two years in Jerusalem with the team
translating and interpreting the Dead Sea Scrolls, Will received
his ordination from the Presbyterian Church in California. In
his more than 40-year career as a professor, he taught at McGill,
Yale, the University of Toronto, and the College of William and
Mary. At the U of T, he launched the Graduate Centre for the
Study of Religion in 1976. Will married Layla
JURJI in 1958,
and together they had two children, David and Susan
OXTOBY.
Subsequent
to Layla's death from cancer in 1980, Will married Julia
CHING,
a renowned scholar of Chinese philosophy and religion, and recipient
of the Order of Canada. Julia, the adoptive mother of John
CHING,
who died of cancer in 2001. Will's loving care for both Layla
and Julia during their illnesses will be long remembered. Willard
OXTOBY died of cancer on March 6 in Toronto, at age 69. He will
be greatly missed by his daughters-in-law Julie
SCOTT and Helen
CHING, by grandchildren Duke and Tessa
OXTOBY and Erica and Michelle
CHING, and by his brother Lowell and sister Louise and their
families. Will touched the lives of many Friends and colleagues,
and will be remembered fondly by many former students. The family
will receive visitors at Morley Bedford Funeral Home, 159 Eglinton
Ave. W., on Sunday, March 9 from 2-5 p.m. Funeral Service will
beheld at Trinity College Chapel, 6 Hoskin Ave., on Wednesday,
March 12 at 3 p.m. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made
in memory of Willard G.Oxtoby, c/o The Hospital for Sick Children
Foundation supporting Neurosurgery, 555 University Ave. Toronto,
M5G 1X8 or online at www.sickkids.ca.

OXTOBY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-03-31 published
Scholar was 'hooked' on religion
Director of Centre for Religious Studies at the University of
Toronto was lauded for important introductory works
By Ron CSILLAGSpecial to The Globe and Mail Monday, March 31,
2003 - Page R7
Like members of the clergy and their early epiphanies, scholars
of religion can often pinpoint the instant they decided to pursue
their calling.
For Willard
OXTOBY, one of the world's foremost students of comparative
religion and founding director of the University of Toronto's
Centre for Religious Studies, a defining moment came at the tender
age of five, when his father, a teacher of Old Testament at a
Presbyterian seminary, taught his son to memorize the 23rd psalm,
in Hebrew. One night, while an advanced Hebrew class met at the
Oxtoby home, young Willard was summoned, in his pyjamas, to recite
the psalm.
"See?" his father told the class. "Even a kid can do Hebrew,
so get on with it."
A decade later, another breakthrough: While accompanying his
father on a preaching visit, the elder
OXTOBY recounted one of
Jesus's parables, and then interrupted his exposition to say,
"Of course that was just a story. Can a thing be true that never
happened?"
About a year before his March 6 death in Toronto of colon cancer
at age 69, the son remembered the father's blunt words as a turning
point: "I can still recall the colour of paint on the wall at
that instant. And thanks to the right question coming at the
right time in my life, I've never had a problem personally handling
the symbolic dimensions of religion."
He did more than merely handle. Through over 40 years of probing,
analyzing, observing and writing in quantities that left colleagues
astonished, Prof.
OXTOBY bequeathed a legacy of scholarship that's
been described as passionate and exuberant. From Anabaptism to
Zoroastrianism, he dove headlong into all the world's major and
minor religious traditions and had the ability, so often demonstrated,
of connecting the dots between them.
"His command of detail was amazing," eulogized his former student,
Alan SEGAL, who now teaches Jewish studies at Barnard College
in New York, "all with specific knowledge of how it made religions
fit together and help explain what religion was all about."
A fixture at the University of Toronto's religion department
for 28 years, Prof.
OXTOBY was a vocal proponent of interfaith
dialogue, believing, as his friend, the Swiss Catholic renegade
Hans KUNG, that there will be no peace on the planet until there
is peace among its inhabitants' religions. In the specific case
of Islam, he called for the need to understand the faith's diversity:
"Lumping people of any group together, as if they're all alike,
is one basic strategy of prejudice."
Prof. OXTOBY knew his share of grief -- he was twice married
and twice widowed -- but he never lost his own footing. "He was
optimistic and curious about everything until his final day,
" said his son David, an executive with Ontario Power Generation
Inc.
Willard Gurdon
OXTOBY was born July 29, 1933, in Kentfield, Calif.,
just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, into a
family of scholars. Both his father and grandfather were ministers
and teachers of the Old Testament, and he spent a year between
high school and college accompanying his father on a sabbatical
to Europe and the Middle East. "I was hooked," he would recall.
"The world of the Bible, both its archeology and its current
events, came alive vividly."
After graduating from Stanford University with a degree in philosophy,
he completed masters and doctoral degrees within a year of each
other at Princeton, specializing in pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions.
In 1958, he married Layla
JURJI, the daughter of one of his Princeton
professors, and the couple spent two years in Jerusalem, with
Prof. OXTOBY as part of the team that studied the Dead Sea Scrolls.
His first teaching job was in Montreal, where he launched McGill
University's inaugural course on Judaism. But after a few years,
he realized he needed to explore the influence of modern-day
Iran on the religion of the Hebrews following their Babylonian
exile. He returned to school, this time to Harvard, to study
Zoroastrianism, an ancient faith born in Persia, possibly the
world's first monotheistic religion. So expert would he become
that he was made an honorary member of the Zoroastrian Society
of Ontario.
He taught at Yale University for five years before accepting
a full professorship at the University of Toronto's Trinity College
in 1971, a relationship that would last until his retirement
in 1999. In between were a slew of visiting professorships, appointments,
awards and fellowships, and authorship of dozens of entries for
dictionaries and encyclopedias on world religions.
Reprising his travels with his father, Prof.
OXTOBY took his
wife and teenage son and daughter, Susan, on an around-the-world
sabbatical beginning in 1976 to study Zoroastrians in the diaspora.
The clan lived in London, India and southeast Asia. The experience
"definitely changed my perspective on the transient nature of
North American culture," recalled Susan, director of programming
at Cinematheque Ontario.
Cancer claimed Prof.
OXTOBY's first wife in 1980. The following
year, he married Julia
CHING, a Shanghai-born onetime Catholic
nun and formidable scholar of Chinese religions and neo-Confucian
philosophy. The two formed an academic partnership at University
of Toronto that produced a slew of monographs and articles, before
cancer took Prof.
CHING in October, 2001.
Prof. OXTOBY was probably best known for two introductory volumes
he edited, World Religions: Western Traditions and World Religions:
Eastern Traditions, in which he wrote chapters on Christianity,
Sikhism, Zoroastrianism and general entries. Both have been hailed
for their lucidity -- examples of his ability to render complex
matters accessible without dumbing them down. He was working
on a condensed, one-volume version of the books at the time of
his death, along with a multitude of other projects.
In all, he travelled to more than 100 countries and studied over
a dozen languages, including Arabic, Ugaritic and Sanskrit.
He was fond of recounting several humorous firsts in his career:
That he was ordained a Presbyterian minister without actually
attending divinity school; that he gathered the inscriptional
data for his dissertation in one day; and that he smuggled pork
sausages into Israel.
A deeply religious man personally and a biblical scholar too,
Prof. OXTOBY never thought of himself as anything other than
a Christian -- but as a comparatavist, never an exclusivist:
"At no time have I ever supposed that God could not also reach
out to other persons in their traditions and communities as fully
and as satisfyingly as He has to me in mine," he concluded in
his 1983 book, The Meaning of Other Faiths. "My Christianity,
including my sense of Christian ministry, has commanded that
I be open to learn from the faith of others."
He extended that openness to his own funeral: "He wanted it to
be non-eucharistic," his son David said. "He wanted everyone
to feel welcome."
Prof. OXTOBY even had a snappy comeback to pious Christians who
asked whether he'd been saved: "Well, I'll be damned if I'm not."